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Maze War is a name that, to many, means nothing. To some, it means everything. And to everyone, it’s a name that we owe so much. Developed in 1974 by one man, Steve Colley, Maze War was a game truly ahead of its time. Gameplay in Maze Wars is extremely simple. Players wander around a maze. They are capable of moving backward or forwards, turning right or left in 90-degree increments, and peeking through doorways. The player moves from square to square in simple tile-based movements. Other players are seen as eyeballs. When a player sees another player, they can shoot, or negatively affect, them. Players gain points for shooting other players, and lose them for being shot.
Sound familiar? It should. It’s the simple formula of Maze War that has shaped so many of today’s first-person shooters. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be going back in time taking a look at the various first-person shooters that have spawned since the creation and release of Maze War, as well as exploring the ideology behind this much loved genre.
It wasn’t until the early 90s that the first-person shooter genre really took off, with the launch of Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, released on MS-DOS, but later ported across various platforms including, most recently, Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. This is by no means the only first-person shooter we’ve come to grow and love, though. No, we need to go further back in time to discover the true origins of this genre, back to 1973, a short but sweet era for first-person games.
Although technically not a first-person shooter, at least not in the same vein as Resistance or Killzone, Maze War (also known as The Maze Game, Maze Wars, Mazewar or The Maze) certainly set a benchmark for videogames. Maze War originated or disseminated a number of concepts used in thousands of games to follow, and is considered one of the earliest examples, or progenitor, of a first-person shooter. Although the year of release is known, its actual release date, for one reason or another, is not. Some people actually believe Maze War is nothing more than a tech demo, testing grounds for the later release, Spasim. An abbreviation of “space simulation,” Spasim was a game truly ahead of its time. By connecting a number of computers up to one another, Spasim allowed up to 32-players to compete against one another. Involving four planetary systems with up to eight players per planetary system, and released in 1974 by Jim Bowery, Spasim had the players fly around in space, appearing to each other as wire-frame space ships, their positions being updated every second.
While this may not sound like the first-person shooters you play today, it goes without saying that we owe both Maze War and Spasim a lot of credit. Maze War, while having an unofficial recorded release date, was the first game to bring forward tile-based movement, a feature that is still used today, albeit at a more advanced level. Videogames later released in the late 80s and early 90s, such as Duke Nukem and Wolfenstein, adopted this method to bring players hours of entertainment. We also owe Spasim for not only providing us with faster-paced first-person action in space, but for also being the fore-runner in what is now considered the biggest selling point when it comes to gaming and, in particular, online first-persons shooters, which will be covered in greater detail in the next article, along with an in-depth look at the first-person shooters that made the late 80s and early 90s so damn enjoyable.
Stay tuned to PSU for Part II of our First-Person Shooter retrospective in the coming weeks.
Article by Tony White